Here is a terrific interview on O’Reilley Radar at http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/07/making-government-transparent.html
It actually talks of using open source statistics like R to make Government more transparent- like analyzing waste.
Some interesting extracts- like I didnt know S is being maintained by SAS.( I thought Tibco had S Plus)
Citation-http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/07/making-government-transparent.html
James Turner: So switching gears, the other thing you’re talking about and a big part of your professional life is the R language. Now I will confess that like Erlang, R is something that is on my radar and I see and I look at it and I say, “Okay. When am I ever going to use it?” I mean Erlang is used some places, but R I guess has a very nichey type of audience, doesn’t it?
Danese Cooper: You know, interestingly enough that’s changing. I think that’s been true. R has been in production or in development, let’s say, for the last 20 years. It is patterned after the S language, which was developed in the ’60s at Bell Labs around the same time that UNIX and C were being developed. And it was S for statistics, right? R is sort of a, “If we had known then what we know now” version of S. They’ve been working on it for 20 years in an academic setting. So it has been very slow to grow. But just in the last couple of years, it’s really gotten to a place where it’s ready for enterprise use. And just this year, the people that maintain S, a company called SAS, S-a-s, in South America, south of this country, have announced that they’re going to have to support R, like it’s that widely used now, particularly in schools.
Danese Cooper works for Revolution COmputing that creates a wonderful and professional version of R called Revolution R – some of the work on parallelization and enabling 64 bit Windows R is great. Danese is also a solid open source credentials person having worked with the Board and also with Apache. O Reilley Media’s work in open source conferences is terrific as well.
That apart, the great stuff is in the rest of this must read interview which is available athttp://radar.oreilly.com/2009/07/making-government-transparent.html
DECISION STATS 